That was fun, I just spent a couple of hours trying to debrick a $5 router I just purchased.
It wasn’t to fix it, it was the challenge. I purchased another WRT160N from RePC. It was just $5. I got a stock dd-wrt on it when I decided to upgrade it to another version. Unfortunately, the other version of for a v3 and the version I got was a v1.
I am fortunate to have a lot of tools in place for this. A soldering iron, USB-TTL adapter, tftp software.
So after bricking a 30/30/30 wasn’t going to fix it. Also there was no web page like the v3 version has to go in to. So I had to go the serial console route.
One of the things I did not have was the original firmware. Heck I didn’t even know what the filenames was.
After some deep looking a found a mediafire probably infected site that said the file name was “WRT160N 1.02.11 001 US code.bin”
It was not safe to download it from there so I put it in my search engine and came accross a ddwrt site which was more respectable.
http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=979510
Then I booted the thing and quickly pressed CTRL+C, it had to be really fast on boot. The instant I plugged the AC power in I had to press CTR+C (I think any key may have worked)
I booted the thing,went in to CFE mode. I didn’t know the command but
Here was a link to some of my options.
https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/techref/bootloader/cfe
I tried being a tftp server but that did not work. I got a code -4. But in hindsight the upload may have worked.
I tried the tftp client mode, this is where I set up a TFTP server on my laptop, and the router would download
Here is the command I issed at the CFE prompt
flash -ctheader 192.168.1.100:fw.bin flash0.trx
From the server it showed a successful transfer, but I still got the -4 error.
I took a chance and rebooted. And it came back, low and behold to the original firmware from linksys